When, in the Sixties, a new writer in the field, I spoke to others, Chip
Delany, say, or Mike Moorcock, about the writers we most admired, a common
handful of names bobbed to the surface. Alfred Bester, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz
Leiber, Phil Farmer, Phil Dick. In each case there'd be electric sparks jumping
between us (Remember . . . that scene . . . the way he . . . ) like massive
neurons firing. Then one or the other of us would mention Sturgeon, and
silence would fall. In respect, certainly, but something more as well. It was
almost as though we realized that whatever we said, whatever words we found,
would be pale imitations of what Sturgeon had done.

* * *

If she's dead, I thought, I'll never find her in this white flood of
moonlight on the white sea, with the surf seething in and over the pale, pale
sand like a great shampoo. Almost always, suicides who stab themselves or
shoot themselves in the heart carefully bare their chests; the same strange
impulse generally makes the sea-suicide go naked.

* * *

These past weeks I've been spending time in company with one of my
oldest friends, a man so deeply imbedded in my life that, were his many
presences there torn away, I myself well might begin to fade—a man I never
met. I read Vintage Books' excellent Selected Stories in a single sitting,
reread two or three favorite novels, shuffled again and again through my stack
of worn paperbacks, dipping in and out like a hummingbird. Then, after
looking back over earlier volumes in Paul Williams's ongoing, heroic project to
restore to print all of Sturgeon's stories, I turned to this latest, seventh volume.

What most surprises me is recognizing how many times I've read many of
these stories, two dozen times or more, some of them, in the forty-five years
that Sturgeon and I have been traveling companions.

By contrast, one of them, "The Education of Drusilla Strange," I read but
once, again some forty-plus years ago, yet remember as vividly as if it were last
week. This story I found to be scored so deeply within me that I didn't so much
read as remember it, in much the same way that I might recall events or
experiences from my own life. And that, perhaps more than anything, gives the
measure of Sturgeon's particular genius.

* * *

The prison ship, under full shields, slipped down toward the cove, and
made no shadow on the moonlit water, and no splash as it slid beneath the
surface. They put her out and she swam clear, and the ship nosed up and
silently fled. Two wavelets clapped hands softly, once, and that was the total
mark the ship made on the prison wall.

* * *

There are writers who throughout their careers with a certain
relentlessness pursue the same themes again and again, forever refining,
restating terms, purifying tone and attack, honing the edge. Years ago in a
New Yorker interview Alberto Moravia remarked of such writers that "Their
truth is self-repeating. They keep rewriting the same book . . . trying to perfect
their expression of the one problem they were born to understand." Glib
perhaps, but in large part true. And especially true, I think, of highly
individualistic writers, those who work within a genre, for instance, yet are
always pushing the envelope (and often, as well, the postbox into which they
drop it) towards some new reach and hold. Their aesthetic goal comes to seem,
and in some respects no doubt is, a search for personal transformation.

* * *

In a wonderful essay on Richard Yates for the Boston Review, Stewart
O'Nan pointed out that among the many obligations we assume as writers is the
imperative to do whatever we can to preserve the work of those who came before
us, to see that it's not forgotten. This is a charge Paul Williams, with his
crusade to ransom Sturgeon's stories, has taken to heart, one which now, in my
own small way, I'd like to second.

More than anyone else, Theodore Sturgeon taught me to write. And long
before that, before I even knew it, I think, he made me want to be a writer.

When I first encountered it, Sturgeon's work affected me in ways no other
had. I could not throw off stories like "The Other Celia," "Bright Segment," "The
Professor's Teddy Bear," "Scars." They followed me around, floated towards me
on the night's dark oil, stalked me. And when, about 1964, I began seriously
trying to write fiction, it was to Sturgeon that I turned. I sat in the student
union of the university I'd not so much dropped out of as evaporated from, and
read compulsively, over and over again, everything of the man's I could find.
More Than Human, The Dreaming Jewels, Some of Your Blood, The Cosmic
Rape. And stories: "The Man Who Lost the Sea," "Cellmate," "A Saucer of
Loneliness," "And Now the News." Trying to see how he did it. Trying to
understand how he went about making his characters so real, how he brought
these made-up worlds into such vivid focus. And just how it was that he
managed to affect me so.

In an introduction to Volume II of the complete Sturgeon stories, Chip
Delany recounts reading "Thunder and Roses" at age ten or eleven, recalling his
fascination at the manner in which Sturgeon paced characters through all sorts
of "ordinary things like shaving and taking showers" making it all so much
more vivid than seemed possible, describing "the feel of warm water down your
neck" and the crumpled tube of toothpaste on the shelf while all along, outside,
the characters' world was coming to an end.

That a writer should uncompromisingly, in stories of the fantastic, set
out to memorialize quotidian life and language seems at first a paradox; in fact,
it's the engine of Sturgeon's art. Such grafting of the extraordinary onto the
ordinary lies at the very heart of what he does. He sweeps up the textures of
momentary life (the only life we ever truly know, after all, however bolstered or
diluted it may be by memory and anticipation) and tucks them into something
far larger. His beloved halfwits, though sanctioned from it, live embedded in
the common society. That common society is itself but one of many echoes,
some audible, some faint, of all societies: historical societies, future societies,
possible societies. Loving humanity, loving his misfits and miscreants perhaps
most of all, so intimately aligned with his characters that he tells their stories
from the inside, nonetheless Sturgeon stands forever apart, seeing the should
and could be in the is. Seeing through to the other side of that is, as
well. Saying again and again, with Rimbaud, that everything we are taught is
false. Believing with Valery that "A work of art should always teach us that we
have not seen what we see."

* * *

Further along in that same introduction, Delany wrote:
"Sturgeon wanted a world that worked differently from the one we live in;
and that difference was that it had a place for love and logic both. What
seemed to bolster him and give him personal patience and also artistic
perseverance was his apprehension of the interconnectedness of all life's varied
and variegated aspects."

This, too, comes close to central concerns. For Sturgeon not only
retrieves and holds in suspension those aspects of life we take so much for
granted—patterns of apprehension, textures of mundane life, what
philosophers call dailyness—he also taps directly into that sense we all have
of the connectedness of things, that sense of something more, something
transcendent, at the core of our consciousness.

Sturgeon wanted "a world that worked differently," Delany remarks,
thereby introducing another aspect of the man. There was about him an
element of contrariety investing all he did. Sadly for all of us, and for Ted
Sturgeon most of all, that contrariety was not always a positive thing. It
allowed him as writer to see things anew, to look through from the other side,
as it were—to cast aside received wisdom, almost without effort, for that
adversary intent Lionel Trilling holds to be at the heart of all great art—but it
also occasioned great personal difficulties, gravely interfered with his career and
disrupted his life, let him judas-goat himself into horrendous writing blocks.

In a 1976 profile, Paul Williams noted:

"Ted told me he'd been hearing this voice inside him all his life which
says, in response to whatever is or seems to be expected of him by the outside
world, 'I won't do it.' Only recently, he said, he's realized that there's another
half to the sentence, and what he's really saying, deep in there somewhere, is, 'I
won't do what they want me to do.' "

Something of the eternal adolescent, then, unwilling or unable to accept
the world as it is, striking out, often with the clear, Rimbaudian brilliance of the
young, other times in blind, insensate fury, when the world will not be as he
wants it to be.

The moralist, the idealist—and Sturgeon was both—feels deeply the
loss of what he, what the world, has never had. That sense of loss everywhere
in Sturgeon is almost Miltonic. His characters, like Drusilla exiled here to this
backwards, prison planet Earth, represent, remember, or envision other, finer
existences. (" . . . Earth, which was her world falsified; and the endless music,
which was her world in truth . . . ") Though often stunted by circumstance,
history, heredity and convention, they are people capable of greatness: the
near-morons of "Bright Segment," The Cosmic Rape and More Than
Human, supermen-unaware like Horty in The Dreaming Jewels, or the
fabulous inventor-songwriter-sculptor-poet-genius of "Maturity." Loners and
outcasts all.

All of them, too, to some degree, self-portraits.

* * *

In A Saucer of Loneliness, this book so filled with amazements, the
most amazing thing of all might easily go overlooked. It shows up in the
Editor's Note: "This seventh volume contains stories written between autumn
1952 and autumn 1953." That in one calendar year a single writer could
publish so many outstanding stories, stories such as " . . . And My Fear Is
Great . . .," "The Wages of Synergy," "A Way of Thinking," "Mr. Costello, Hero,
"The World Well Lost," "The Touch of Your Hand," stories of such excellence as
would support any other writer's entire career, is astonishing. His first novel,
The Dreaming Jewels, had come out in 1950; More Than Human appeared
in book form in 1953. Stories like "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff," "To
Here and the Easel" and "Hurricane Trio" waited just around the corner.

* * *

Yancey, who had once been killed, lay very still with his arm flung
across the pillow, and watched the moonlight play with the color of Beverly's
hair. . . .The waves blundered into the cliff below, hooting through the sea-
carved boulders, frightening great silver ghosts of spray out and up into the
torn and noisy air. . . .He wished he could sleep. For two years he had been
glad he did not sleep.

* * *

Art, like great conversation, contrives to rescue us from the
commonplace, to break through the crust of habit and routine and let us see
anew, feel anew—to make our world large again.

This is something I first learned at age twelve, sitting on a screened
porch half a mile away from Huck's Mississippi with Jimmy Reed and Hank
Williams spilling from the jukebox at the drive-in just down the road. And it
wasn't from William Faulkner or Robert Browning or James Joyce that I learned
it (though I was reading them all), but from Theodore Sturgeon. I realize it
again each time I go back to him. What better reason to keep going back?

Theodore Sturgeon is among the finest writers this country has
produced. He is, like all great writers, all great artists, absolutely one of a kind,
sui generis. We can only hope that, with time, with crusading efforts such as
Paul Williams's, he might come to receive the approbations due him.
Meanwhile, he remains an intimate part of many of us.

Sturgeon's stories are pokers stirring the coals of our lives and feelings
back to flame. They are, each of them, anthems of praise and wonder sung by
one small cell to the larger organism, to Life.

The Imagination is not a State, Blake wrote: it is the Human Existence
itself.